i have a nestle-aland greek-english nt. the interesting feature about this nt has the greek on one page and the english on the next, so that way you're looking at both greek and english at the same time. what i'm trying to do is learn greek by building a vobulary. i also have the book "the elements of new testament greek" by jeremy duff

my question is this : can a person effectively learn greek without learning all the grammatical terminology, or not?

Theoretically yes, but I don't think it would be all that easy or efficient. I think it would take a long time to really understand and recognize the huge variety of verb and noun forms and different constructions just by comparing them with the translation and hoping your brain will start to absorb them all, and it would likely be a more frustrating and demoralizing experience than simply learning the grammar in the first place. Plus, unless the translation is as close to word-for-word as possible, you may be led astray by it rather than helped. Even with a very literal translation, however, there is simply not a 1-1 correspondence from Greek words and grammatical forms to English equivalents. Many things in Greek do not translate nicely and directly into English, so the English wording often must be a rough paraphrase instead of a literal translation, and it will be difficult if not impossible to see why the Greek means what it does in English without some grammatical knowledge to draw on.

charlie wrote:my question is this : can a person effectively learn greek without learning all the grammatical terminology, or not?

A person can if he can find others who already know Greek so he can have conversations with them. That is how I learned Dutch and English and that is how you learned your native language as well. Without that, I think it would be very difficult to learn Greek without knowing the relevant grammatical terms.

I'm not sure what you mean by all the grammatical terminology. You will have to memorize a few dozen paradigms at least. Duff will give you all the ESSENTIAL information to learn NT Greek. If you just go from him and do intensive reading it could work. There is a school of thought that says we have focused way too much on grammar as it is.